


you can tell me what to see (i will choose what i believe)

by TheJGatsby



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 12:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6754294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben Solo was nine years old when the words appeared on his skin.<br/>For as long as Rey can remember, she’s had the words on her arm.</p>
<p>(Soulmate AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Mess is Mine by Vance Joy

 

Ben Solo was nine years old when the words appeared on his skin.

He knew what they meant, of course- soulmates are a legend in the same way the Jedi are, these days. Most everyone believes it’s at least possible, if not probable, if not true. Since he talked to his uncle Luke all the time, believing in soulmates was never much of a stretch. So when he woke up one morning to find them scrawled across his chest, over his heart, he couldn’t help the thrill in his stomach, the knowledge that there was someone out there in the universe just for him, someone who’d love him, someone made to be his the way he was made to be theirs. He had to take a picture with his datapad to read them, the first words his soulmate would ever say to him, because they were backwards in the mirror.

He spent half an hour in the ‘fresher crying and rubbing at his chest with soap, a sponge, his own clawed hand, anything to make them go away.

_ No _ , says the space over his heart in traitorous, undeniable black,  _ no, it can’t be  _ you.

_...it can’t be  _ you.

Ben thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the emphasis. Maybe there would have been some other way to interpret it, maybe circumstances would have brought some sort of logic to it. But the emphasis on “you” just told him all he didn’t want to know. Nobody wanted him. Not his mother, who was always busy, not his father, who was always gone, and not his soulmate, who was apparently going to be revolted by his mere existence.

He was too young to be so sad.

 

For as long as Rey can remember, she’s had the words on her arm. They run down her bicep to the crook of her elbow, and they were the first thing she learned to read, sounding them out slowly under the watchful eye of a mother she can’t remember, or maybe a father, she was so young and the past slips away so easily.

_ The girl I’ve heard so much about _ .

The words gave her hope, on the hard days. When she was shaking with hunger and exhaustion, and optimism felt like a joke, she could comfort herself with the thought that even  _ if _ , and that was a big if, her family never came back, there was still the future. There was still her soulmate. Someone who’d love her the way she wanted to be loved, treasure her, and be  _ hers _ , the way nothing and no one had ever been hers.

She daydreamed often about them, about who they were, what they were like. She wanted them to have kind eyes and a soft voice, to only touch her with love and gentleness. She couldn’t remember what any of that was like, if she’d ever known, but she knew it was what she wanted, more than anything. She wanted to be  _ loved _ .

She wanted-  _ oh _ , how she wanted to be wanted.

 

It was easy, in the abstract, to write his soulmate off. He hardened his heart against them, the same way he hardened his heart against his parents, the same way he hardened his heart against anything but the whispering voice in his head that was so inextricably a part of him he didn’t realize until it told him that it belonged to someone else, another being entirely.

His name was Snoke, and  _ he _ wanted Ben.

When Leia looked nervous around her son, Snoke told him she was afraid, that when she told him she loved him she was lying. Snoke didn’t have to tell him anything when his father left, over and over again- that one was clear enough all on its own. When Ben looked in the mirror and felt the familiar twist of despair at  _ it can’t be  _ you, Snoke was there, his voice situated somewhere behind his too-big ears, telling Ben that they didn’t matter either, that none of them did, that none of them deserved him, that he was too  _ powerful _ , that his destiny was too great, that he was  _ special _ , and they were afraid, and he didn’t need them.

So his despair lit into anger, lit into hate, and he burned it all away, locked his scorched-earth heart deep inside him where only he and his master knew it was even there. Blocking out Snoke never occurred to him- and why would it? Snoke cared in exactly the way no one else ever would- without fear, his only condition Ben’s unwavering loyalty. He didn’t need anyone else, as long as he had Snoke.

Snoke taught him how to embrace the darkness, how to spurn the light, how to turn sadness and yearning into something more sinister. Snoke told him that the only way he’d ever really be strong was if he left behind everything that smacked of weakness, of  _ sentimentality _ , of the downfall of his once-great ancestor, Darth Vader.

Ben was nineteen when he decided he would kill his soulmate.

 

“You got a boyfriend?” Finn asks. “Cute boyfriend?”

Rey’s hand twitches, unconsciously, to where her arm wraps cover up  _ the girl I’ve heard so much about _ . “None of your business,” she snaps.

When Finn looks at her with something a little like wonder, she shuffles back through their meetings- but  _ What? Thief? _ isn’t what’s written on her skin. She’s disappointed, but also a little relieved, because it wasn’t what she always dreamed- someone beautiful and dashing finding her on Jakku, exactly the girl they’d heard so much  about, just who they’d always wanted to find, and they’d fall immediately in love, and it would be wonderful and she’d be happy, and maybe her family would be with them, and they would all find her together, and her life would start the way it was supposed to. There’s still a chance for that, once she gets back to Jakku. She has to go back.

But Finn not being her soulmate doesn’t stop her from loving him immediately, unconditionally- she knows they aren’t fated in that way, but it still feels a lot like they were meant for each other. She feels the humming thrill of a more real hope, a tangible future in his brave eyes and quick thinking, and for a moment she thinks, well, she’s destined to meet her soulmate no matter what, right? It doesn’t  _ have _ to be on Jakku- but she has a family to wait for. She has to go back.

And then he just- leaves. Like everyone else, he walks away from her without looking back, and she’s left staring after him, and she’s five years old again, sand itching in her boots for the first time, her pale skin suffering already under the harsh desert sun.

When she holds the lightsaber and sees places she’s never been, there’s a  boy in her vision. He’s only there for a moment, his hand curled into a claw over his heart, and he looks heartbroken in an agonizingly familiar way- she knows his pain, because it’s hers, too, that deep, hollow sort of loneliness like a phantom limb, that negative space in her soul. As if that weren’t enough, she has to relive the moment of her abandonment, watch her tiny self scream helplessly after a spaceship that was never, ever coming back for her. It’s the first time she’s ever let herself entertain the idea-  _ never coming back _ \- and now she can’t unthink it. And then Maz says it, and it’s too much, and she runs.

She’s afraid of him in a primal, adrenaline-fueled way when he appears, a figure from her nightmare, following after her with heavy footsteps and a fiery, crackling blade. Her animal brain says  _ enemy _ , and she listens. Then he seems to tire of the chase, and she’s frozen in place, and her instincts are all over the place as he stands close to her-  _ too close! _ \- and turns his ominous black mask to face her, the silver-lined eye slits trained on her. She shakes with the effort of trying to break whatever force is holding her in place, and then-

“The girl I’ve heard so much about.”

Her first thought is that he’s obviously using a voice changer, that no one’s voice sounds like  _ that _ , and then that it’s not how she expected to hear it at all- he sounds curious, not confident; distant, not excited.

Rey had thought she knew pain, but it’s nothing like  _ this _ , nothing like the feeling of all her hopes draining away from her for good- her family never coming back, the sight of her first and only friend’s back disappearing out the door, her soulmate holding a weapon in her face. She wants, for the first time in her life, to just give up, and when darkness floods over her, her last thought is that she has nothing left to live for anyway, now, as her last hope for the future knocks her unconscious and takes her prisoner.

 

Kylo can’t say what it is, precisely, that fascinates him about her. He knows she’s seen the map, and that’s part of it, but underneath that there’s something… more, something he can’t quite understand, something drawing him to her, something he needs to  _ know _ . So he takes her in his arms and he holds her close against his chest and for a moment there’s something so  _ right _ about that motion, and he wonders what it is the Force is trying to tell him.

A stormtrooper turns to him once her limp form is strapped into the chair. “Sir, would you like us to get-”

“That won’t be necessary,” he says, strangely horrified by the idea of letting one of the lesser interrogators near her. They’d hurt her- he doesn’t want that. “I’ll interrogate her myself.” 

“...Yes, sir.”

He settles in the corner of the room to wait, letting his eyes fix on her face, study the lines of it, the curve of her cheek and the twitch of her lips. When she wakes, she jerks against the restraints and glances around wildly, and then her eyes settle on him and fill with something so indescribably  _ sad _ that he feels his breath hitch in his throat to see it.

“No,” she says, so softly he’s certain he wasn’t meant to hear it, “it can’t be  _ you _ .”

Kylo’s hand twitches towards his heart.

He had never considered, in all his years of thinking about his soulmate, that he might have been wrong about how it would sound. He had assumed it would be… aggressive. Disgusted. Furious. Revolted. Not this soft, tragic disappointment. It catches hold of his heart and squeezes, all agonizing familiarity, and he knows in that moment that he can’t kill her, couldn’t hurt her if he wanted to. Twenty years of hate dissipates in the face of her mournful hazel eyes and the hopeless slouch to her shoulders.

For a moment he wants, desperately, selfishly, to keep her here, with him, never let her go, because he knows he won’t hurt her, because of the fierce, protective flame in his chest- but she would be his weakness. She already is. He’ll get what he needs from her and then… he doesn’t know what, then.

Lost in his thoughts, Kylo doesn’t notice the way she seems to steel herself, shoulders straightening, fists tightening. When she speaks again, it is confident and challenging, her fear and sadness hidden away so well he can barely tell she’s the same person. “Where am I?”

“You’re my guest,” he says, without thinking. She narrows her eyes at him, and he can see murder in her face. “You still want to kill me, even knowing….”

“That’s what happens when you’re being hunted by a  _ creature _ in a mask,” she spits, and it riles him. There’s the disgust he always expected. He can’t seem to rouse any anger towards her- he’s too aware of the way she looked a moment ago, her words still running through his mind.

So he reaches up, his heartbeat quickening, fear pooling in his gut, half of his mind screaming at him not to do this, not to allow this vulnerability, that he is already too weak for her just by letting her live, and with trembling hands he removes his mask.

Her eyes widen for a moment when he looks up at her bare-faced, and it’s almost imperceptible, but he catches it, and it gives him something- a flutter of hope, maybe? He crushes the feeling as he sets his helmet down next to him before standing and stepping towards her.

“Tell me about the droid.”

“It’s a BB unit with a selenium drive and-”

_ Cute _ , he thinks, and then chastises himself.  _ Enemy enemy she’s my enemy she’s my weakness stop this. _

“It’s carrying a section of a navigational chart,” he interrupts evenly. “You know what I want to know. Tell me about the droid,  _ please _ .”

“I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re talking about.” She tilts her chin up at him, and he almost wants to smile. Powerless and restrained and she still has fire.

“If you won’t tell me, there are other methods,” he says, doing all he can to take the threat out of a threatening sentence. Despite himself, he wants her to- not hate him. He wants her to think better of him than she did when she said  _ it can’t be  _ you. “They aren’t… I won’t hurt you, but they aren’t pleasant. Just tell me about the droid so I don’t have to resort to anything neither of us want.”

“I’ll die first,” she says, leaning forward, pressing against her restraints to glare at him.

Reaching into her mind is almost too easy, and he holds back, sticking to the surface, wandering through everything close to the top, as careful as he can be, feather-light in the Force. It’s meant to be a demonstration, not an invasion.

“You’re so lonely,” he says, soft, watching day after day of solitude run through her mind. “So… afraid to leave. At night… desperate to sleep.” Unbidden, the thought flickers behind his eyes, her wrapped in his arms, peaceful, dreaming. He almost jerks away from her before he realizes it was  _ his _ thought. He presses deeper, just a touch, and he finds the open wound of her despair, and he  _ understands _ . Fourteen years of waiting, and her soulmate her last hope- and she got  _ him. _

Kylo doesn’t blame her for her words. Not when he can see through her eyes the pale skin of her arm,  _ The girl I’ve heard so much about _ . Not when he can see her daydreams, her endless yearning, someone with kind eyes and gentle hands, someone who loves her. He lingers there, on the nebulous thought of a love she can’t define, a kindness she’s never known, and he wants, fervently, desperately, to be the soulmate she deserves. Of all the things he’s done wrong in his life he  _ aches _ for the chance to do this right.

Then he runs into a familiar face and it riles him briefly. “Han Solo,” he says, unsettled, and then he notices the feeling surrounding him- warmth, an eager fondness, the bright thrill of his approval. The memories hit something hollow and painful inside of Kylo, and he can’t decide whether he envies her or hates himself more.

“Get out of my head,” she snarls, and then the Force trembles and he feels her pushing into his mind.

It’s careless, destructive- none of the practiced finesse he’s acquired over years of using his skill, and he scrambles to block her out, but just as quickly as he throws up walls, she knocks them down, and then she narrows her eyes at him again.

“You. You’re  _ afraid _ . That you’ll never be as strong-”

“Enough!” he growls, recoiling, shoving her out. She’s strong. She’s so strong. They’re frozen like that for a moment, at an impasse, and he breaks the silence first. “I- I’m sorry.”

Before he can second-guess himself, he waves his hand and frees her from the restraints, storming out of the room.

 

Han can’t feel the Force. He can’t sense every living being in the universe or move things with his mind or any of the other garbage Luke and Leia and Ben can. But he does have intuition, and he trusts his gut, and that’s what makes him look up in time to see the black-robed figure that might still be his son walk out onto the bridge.

“Ben!” he shouts, and watches him freeze and turn.

“Han Solo.” It’s not the voice he remembers, but of course it wouldn’t be- he’s older, so much older, and wearing that stupid-

“Take off that mask,” he says. “You don’t need it.”

“What do you think you’ll see if I do?” there’s something small and frightened in his voice, behind the stoic bravado of someone trying to intimidate.

“The face of my son.”

He sees the way Ben’s shoulders tense, the catch of his breath, and then he reaches up and practically rips the helmet away, dropping it unceremoniously to the ground.

All Han can think in that moment is that he really grew into those damned ears.

“Your son is gone,” Ben says, his eyes on the ground, a lot smaller without the mask to make his voice something garbled and terrifying. “He was too weak to survive.”

“That’s what Snoke wants you to think,” Han says, earnest, stepping forward. “But it’s not true- my son is  _ alive _ .”

Ben looks at him with something sad and resigned in his eyes, and Han feels twenty years younger, seeing those same sad brown eyes watch him leave for the last time. “No. It’s too late.”

“Snoke is just using you for your power. When he gets what he wants, he’ll crush you.”

Ben’s shoulders curl inward just slightly, and if the cavernous room weren’t so eerily silent- why are they always so  _ silent _ \- Han wouldn’t have heard him say, “I know.”

It’s enough. It’s a chance. It’s  _ hope _ . Han steps forward again. “Leave here with me,” he implores. “Come home,” he begs. “We miss you.”

Ben’s hands shake, and he looks as if he wants nothing more than to step sideways into the void and free himself from the agony behind his eyes. “I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it,” he says. “Will you help me?”

Han is close enough that he could reach out and touch his son if he wanted to, for the first time in twenty years. “Yes,” he says, “anything.”

Ben takes a deep, shuddering breath, and blinks rapidly a few times. “The girl- the scavenger, she’s here.”

“Rey?” Han asks, bewildered, and watches as Ben blinks in surprise, his lips moving silently in the shape of her name. “We found her, she’s with us.” His son sighs in obvious relief.

“Get her out of here. I don’t care how just- get her offworld, as fast as you can, away from me, away from the war, away from everything.” Han nods mutely, and Ben’s hands twitch as if he wants to reach out, but he keeps them firmly by his side. “Please, just- she admires you, be good to her, please keep her out of this. It doesn’t have to be her fight.”

“I don’t- why is she so important?”

Ben’s hand moves to his chest, right over his heart, unconscious and unbidden. “I can’t tell you. But she is.”

“What about you?”

Ben pauses for a long moment, and when he looks back at Han there’s something determined and alive in his face. “I need you to shoot me.”

“What?”

“Snoke won’t be pleased if he thinks I let you live, I need a good reason, shoot me.”

Han shakes his head, still completely confused. “Why can’t you just leave with us?”

Ben snorts. “You know I can’t do that.” He flexes his hand and Han’s blaster flies out of his holster- he  _ hates _ it when Force-sensitives do that, dammit- and offers it to him. “Please.”

Every instinct screaming against him, Han presses the barrel of his blaster into the thick cloth at his son’s stomach and pulls the trigger.

Ben hardly even reacts, nothing but a soft whimper and a fleeting grimace of pain, and somehow that’s the worst part, because how much has he  _ endured _ that he can just grit his teeth against a point-blank blaster shot to the gut? He stumbles backwards a step and coughs, blood dripping down the corner of his mouth and making the small smile he offers his father grotesque as he says, “Thank you.”

Han backs up slowly, then turns and runs off the bridge, leaving Ben behind, bleeding out in the fading light of a dying sun.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i... don't know how long this is going to be anymore. sorry it took so long to post!

“So how about that job?” says Han to Rey, sitting down next to her at the dejarik table

“What?” she says, blinking like he’s just woken her from a daydream. “Oh. The job.”

“You’re not still going back to Jakku, are you?” He looks at her with something in his eyes just kinder than pity, and she tries not to shrink into herself.

“No,” she replies, soft. “I- they’re not coming for me. I’m not going back.” She tries, valiantly, as much as she has for the hours since they left Starkiller burning behind them, not to think about Kylo Ren. She fails, and fights back the wave of disappointment and heartbreak.

He’s probably dead anyway. Her pain is irrelevant.

“You don’t have to decide yet,” Han says, resting a hand on her shoulder, “but there’s a place for you if you want it.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Rey blurts out. “I saw you shoot him. And Starkiller exploded. He’d be dead, right?”

Han just sighs. “I don’t know, kid.”

Rey tucks her knee up against her chest and rests her chin on it. She doesn’t know whether she wants him to have survived. “I’ll stay,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” He stands and starts to walk away, then turns back. “Really, though. Don’t mention it. I have a reputation.”

Rey can’t help but smile as he disappears back into the cockpit.

A place for her.

 

Kylo wakes in the medbay on the Finalizer, and for a while he can’t manage a coherent thought through the fog of agony. Supreme Leader must have told them not to give him any painkillers again. He’s not surprised, not in the least, after what he did. After his… he wants to think of it as a failure, but he can’t. Not when he feels an unfamiliar sense of peace at the knowledge that she’s out there, safe, far away from him, and hopefully getting further with every minute.

But with that peace comes a regret deeper than any other, that he’d written her off so quickly, that he’d just  _ assumed _ \- idiot. If he’d just been less of a fool when he was younger, things could have been so  _ different _ … but then, maybe it was always meant to come here. Maybe there never really was another choice- if he’d ignored the rejection written on his chest, it wouldn’t have happened that way. If his words had been different, maybe, but… what’s done is done, and thinking about the past won’t change it.

“You’re awake.” It’s the last voice Kylo wants to hear, and he briefly wishes the shot had killed him just so he could have avoided having to hear Hux’s sneer ever again. “Supreme Leader is livid.”

“Why, because  _ your _ stormtroopers failed to stop intruders?” His voice doesn’t crack or waver, and for that he’s proud.

Kylo can practically feel Hux bristling with rage. “If you had just-”

“I don’t see how protecting Starkiller was my responsibility. It wasn’t my project. Frankly it was a monstrosity, I’m just glad it’s gone and I’ll never again have to think about how blatantly you were compensating for-”

“Watch your mouth, Ren,” Hux snaps. He doesn’t hit Kylo, but he can tell from the creak of his leather gloves as his fists clench that it’s a near thing.

“Was that all, Hux? Or did you have more shortcomings you wanted to pin on me so you don’t have to confront your own inadequacy?”

Hux looks like he wants to spit on him, but instead he storms out the door. Kylo sighs in relief and turns his eyes to the viewport. 

Kylo needs to get out.

 

“Do we get to choose our fates, or are they just… written in stone?”

Rey and Finn are lying in the bunkroom, trying in vain to rest on their way back to D’Qar. She hopes he's as restless as she is, at least, if only because her mind can't stop poking at the open wound of her soulmate and it’s keeping her awake. On Jakku, she would have just talked to herself until she worked it out, but on Jakku, her problems were much simpler.

“I'd like to think we have some choice,” Finn responds, after a long pause. “But who knows, really?”

Rey’s fist curls tight in her blankets, pulling them close to ward off the chill of space. Sleep eludes her; every time she closes her eyes all she can see is  _ him _ , a cascade of images, his beautiful, heartbroken face, staggering back as a blaster shot rang out, that one fleeting thought he caught reading her mind, her wrapped in his arms, peaceful, dreaming.

Finn leaves them when they get back to D’Qar, opting to stay with the Resistance and Poe.

“I’ve got a reason to fight,” he tells Rey, just before they land, and she thinks he means the Resistance, destroying the First Order, getting revenge for the childhood he lost, but then she sees, wrapped around his wrist, just under his sleeve, a flash of letter, a word she can’t make out, maybe “desist” or “insist” or “resist.” Either way, she understands. It’s more.

She watches him go, her hand resting unconsciously on her arm. Would she fight for him, her soulmate? Clearly not, since- well, it’s not as if she has a chance. He imprisoned her, she has every reason to distrust him.

But in another world, she wonders. In a world where he found her first, where everything was the same except their first meeting was as she thought it would be, awe and kindness on the sands of Jakku, no Finn, no Takodana, no nothing, just her and him and the rest of the galaxy as distant and inconsequential to her life as it had always been?

Maybe. Perhaps. Probably.

She turns and walks back into the Falcon, wanders until she finds something that needs fixing- it doesn’t take long, the ship is nearly a century old and it’s held together now mostly by bonding tape and spite, but she can see why Han’s held on so long. The ship is a part of him, as much as his right arm, or Chewie.

As much, she thinks, as Kylo Ren is a part of her- irrevocable, eternal, for better or for worse, as broken and impossible and ill-fated as it is.

Han squawks when he sees her, hanging from the ceiling with her legs wrapped around a pipe and one arm bent over another. “Dammit,” he grumbles to himself, “I’d have fixed that if it needed fixing!”

Rey releases her hold so she’s dangling upside-down by her legs from the ceiling. “Really?” she says, raising- or maybe lowering?- an unimpressed eyebrow. “Because you could get up here, of course.”

“I brought you onto this ship and I can kick you off,” Han huffs, skulking around her and towards the cockpit. Rey rolls her eyes, grinning, and hoists herself back up to finish the repair.

It’s mostly luck that she’s obscured by the ceiling tiles when the general walks in, and some reflex tells her to shrink in further, to hide herself. She’s not sure why- it’s not as if she’s frightened of Leia Organa. In fact, she quite admires her, just from what popular myth and Han have told her.

“Is he alive?” she demands immediately, and Rey hears Han sigh rather than answer. “Is Ben alive or not?”

_ Ben? _ she wonders, briefly, then recalls Han barking that name at Kylo Ren, remembers “the face of my son,” makes connections in her mind, and-  _ oh _ \- nearly falls out of the ceiling with surprise.

Their son. Kylo Ren is their son.

 

He stares out at the stars and thinks of her.

In the days since Starkiller, lying silent and near blind with pain in the medbay, he’s lost count of the number of times he’s run through what he knows, turned the little piece of herself she left behind over and over in his mind like a smooth stone, run through the same rut of thought enough times to make scars in his brain as deep as the ones on his body. The loneliness, the hunger, the pain- it’s there, clear and comprehensible and familiar, and he knows it as intimately as he knows his own heart, because it might as well be his own heart with how her agony parallels his, how their heartache throbs in tandem.

On the other side is everything else- her hope, her dreams, her brightness, and he is careful with that side of her, not only because he fears for it, buried and surrounded by the dark, rough, echoing agony of himself, but also because it is so strong and breathtaking and overwhelming that he fears it may swallow him whole. Though he won’t put words to the feeling, he knows he wants it- wants  _ her _ to consume him, destroy him, chew him up and spit him out broken or better it doesn’t matter as long as he gets to experience the full force of her in all her splendor.

He’s obsessing, he knows. He can’t bring himself to care.

In the dark of the night, that piece of her comforts him like nothing ever has, inspires a loyalty he didn’t know he could feel. He’ll do right by her, whatever that means, or die trying.

 

Rey tries not to listen to their conversation, but she can’t move, either, so she just covers her ears and waits until their voices fade to move again, dropping down onto soft feet and sneaking away to the cargo hold. Her chest is a twisted, pounding riot of competing anxieties- should she tell them? Does it even matter? She doesn’t want anything to do with him, does she? So wouldn’t it just hurt them more to know? What would they think of her?

There’s a belief, often, surrounding soulmates- that the bond of fate trumps everything else, that all other prejudices and faults should be-  _ must _ be set aside in light of irrevocable evidence that two people are meant to be. Rey never quite minded it before, because she couldn’t see a world where she  _ had _ to overcome anything to be with her soulmate, but now it makes her want to scream. It’s profoundly, infuriatingly unfair, that after everything else in her life, the universe had to do this to her as well.

She doesn’t cry, because she hasn’t cried since she was a girl, but she sits in the cargo hold with her head in her hands, breath ragged like she’s drowning, till Han finds her.

“Your son’s my soulmate,” she says, before she can think twice, because the last thing she wants is to deceive the people she cares about, and don’t they deserve to know?

There’s a long pause. “Ben doesn’t have a soulmate,” Han says, finally, but even Rey can hear the doubt in his voice. Rey chokes on a laugh.

“I might not be his, but he’s mine,” she says, and the words taste bitter in her mouth.

 

Kylo had always prided himself on being rational, on being thoughtful, on being sure of his decisions. But he can’t afford to think things through now- he doesn’t have the time, and he can’t afford the risk of Snoke seeing into his mind.

It’s hard enough as it is, keeping his thoughts of Rey far from where Snoke will find them, keeping up the familiar wall of hatred and resentment towards his soulmate, pretending he still doesn’t know who they are. If Snoke suspected, if Snoke was angry, his flimsy defenses would be nothing in comparison, and he’d put both of them in danger.

Kylo has always been a good liar, especially when it comes to his soulmate- the only other being in the galaxy who even knows he  _ has _ one is Snoke. But he’s so caught up in her, in the idea of her, in the thought that he’s somehow  _ hers _ … even if she hates him for the rest of her life, just the knowledge of it makes him feel something indecipherable but unquestionably  _ good _ . It feels a lot like hope, something he hasn’t known for a long time. He knows, and has known since the moment she first left him reeling in the interrogation room, that he’d do anything for her, anything at all, and damn the consequences.

So two weeks after Starkiller, when his wounds have healed enough for him to move again, he gets an officer to find him the last known location of the Millennium Falcon and the Resistance’s base, then he goes into a meditative trance. First, he does all he can to heal himself further, because he doesn’t know when he’ll next have access to medical care.

After that, well- he’s always known was theoretically possible, but no one was ever enough of an idiot to do it to themself, so he has no idea whether it’s even feasible, no idea if it’s reversible, no idea what will happen, no idea if he’ll even survive. But it’s also the only way to keep himself completely out of Snoke’s clutches, so he reaches into himself, finds his connection with the Force, hopes for the best, and severs it.

The shock of pain is like nothing he’s ever felt, his head, his chest, his bones, hell, he wasn’t sure he had a soul before but he knows he does now because it  _ hurts _ . He automatically reaches for the Force, but that action alone sends another wave of agony through him. It’s the disorientation of losing a sense mixed with the agony of losing a limb, but he won’t let himself regret it.

_ This is my out _ , he tells himself, over and over, as he stumbles through the Finalizer towards the hangars.  _ I had to do it _ .

He focuses on Rey, on the piece of her she left behind, and while it echoes with the Force in a way that makes him ache, the memory of her, tragic and indomitable, soothes him.

He presses on.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


End file.
